3 Showstopping Examples Of How Extreme Usefulness Is The Best Marketing Tool

Rarely is customer support the hero within the company. Most believe customer service is just a cost center that doesn't directly contribute to sales. Helping customers after you convinced them to buy your product doesn't appear to have any tangible value--and the company that can provide a clear path from a good support experience into a first or second sale is a rare thing.

But let's really talk about support for a moment throwing out a traditional sales and marketing mentality.

Think about some of the brands that have the best service in the world. Firstly let’s just admit these brands have a reputation for being weird. Think about Zappos. These service organizations have that enthusiasm in their soul. It’s an intuition that a good post-purchase service experience is the right thing to do for the brand.

While these companies zoom forward others still sit in customer support purgatory waiting to get investment dollars to be a best in class organization. They sit around pulling their hair out trying to find ROI to take to the decision makers to get budget. Today in business it's not acceptable to say in a meeting, "investing in service is common sense" or "it's a leap of faith."

But in thinking about the reality of today's customer sentiment and customer expectations I recently saw a tweet come across my screen from AmEx executive Augie Ray. He made a statement in his tweet that essentially said customers don’t care about marketing. They care about getting help. You see the actual work of enthusiastically being helpful to the customer is without a doubt the most powerful way to win the customer's heart.

Your customers don't care if you always say the right thing. They are too busy planning trips to new locales, getting into shape or even finding the right look for a wedding. Are you helping them before, during and after? Great service organizations are there through the entire journey being helpful at every step.

In considering these three scenarios above here are three showstopping examples of extreme usefulness, the ultimate path to extreme customer loyalty.

In his book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not HypeJay Baer provides compelling examples of extreme usefulness. One scenario comes from Hilton Worldwide. Hilton has a program called @HiltonSuggests. The @HiltonSuggests team--there to provide free travel tips--are from hotel concierge desks. None of them had any Twitter experience prior to joining @HiltonSuggests. Baer says "one of the most critical elements of this program is the way it combines [what he calls] Youtility and human touch. Twitter is a personal channel, and Hilton is essentially eavesdropping strategically." They don't provide tips that profit Hilton, they focus on helpfulness without regard for venue. Here's an example from earlier today:

This powerful service experience given to not just Hilton customers but anyone on Twitter will greatly benefit Hilton's marketing efforts without even talking about Hilton. See how very attractive helpfulness is?

Fitbit Knows Customer Service is a Marathon Not a Sprint

Firstly I will tell you most of my family are Fitbit fanatics. My dad paces his house just to beat my husband and me on the Fitbit leaderboard. But there have been a few challenges with our beloved products along the way. A few years ago we couldn't get our Fitbit Aria scale that measures weight and body fat percentage to work (sometimes you don't want it to work but I digress). We couldn't get the scale to sync with our computer on an online dashboard. After much back and forth with their people on the phone they emailed to offer us a "house call" to fix the problem. We are lucky in that we live in the Bay Area and it wasn't too far from their headquarters. Even so it was a 40 minute drive each way for them plus the bridge toll. Additionally they sent two Fitbit engineers--and I'm sure paying for three hours of their time costs more than the Aria scale. However Fitbit is invested in learning more about how to fix problems like we had for future customers.

While house calls aren't part of their standard customer service offering @Fitbit has a service oriented "whatever it takes" approach.

Bloomingdales Tracks Customer Data So You Don't Have To

I got married last year and I ordered what I thought were the perfect earrings from Bloomingdales.com. Much to my dismay they didn't look great on me. I returned the earrings and got a credit. Six months later I was walking around my neighborhood after a manicure and my wallet fell out of my pocket. The credit was in the wallet. I did not expect Bloomingdales to replace this credit, but eager to at least try I reached out to @Bloomingdales on Twitter to see if they had the credit on record.

Through a few email exchanges from their Social@Bloomingdales email address they replaced it (and even overnighted the new one to me). I was so shocked they replaced my card because only 47 percent of companies even have a customer relationship management tool (CRM) at all. In fact Gartner predicts the CRM market will grow by 36 billion dollars by 2017. So it's not just Bloomingdales that realizes how important a strong multichannel CRM actually is.

In conclusion whether it's going the extra mile on social media, going above and beyond through traditional service channels or having solid CRM tools, you have the opportunity to win customers through extreme usefulness. I won't tell you where to put your budgets, but I will encourage you to think outside the box when it comes to service. It might be your best bet in the marathon of winning customer hearts.

For more customer strategy follow Blake Morgan on Twitter at @BlakemichelleM